Solid state light emitting devices such as light emitting diodes are extremely useful because they potentially offer lower fabrication costs and long term durability benefits over conventional incandescent and fluorescent lamps. Due to their long operation (burn) time and low power consumption, solid state light emitting devices frequently provide a functional cost benefit, even when their initial cost is greater than that of conventional lamps. However, because large scale semiconductor manufacturing techniques can be used, many solid state lamps can be produced at extremely low cost. One such device is the solid state light emitting diode (LED) which has low fabrication (costs, long operational lifetimes and low maintenance costs.
Light emitting diodes (LEDs), and similarly constructed super luminescent diodes and semiconductor diode lasers, are commercially available and a wide variety of designs and manufacturing techniques have been developed. In addition to applications such as indicator lights on home and consumer appliances, audio visual equipment, telecommunication devices and automotive instrument markings, such LEDs have found considerable application in indoor. and outdoor informational displays. Until recently, LEDs have produced light only in the red, green or amber ranges and have not been generally suitable for replacing, for example, incandescent bulbs, with normally a white luminescence, in a wide variety of display applications. The recent introduction of a bright blue LED, however, allows white light LED systems to be realized and thus has the potential to open the display market to LEDs by providing a practical means to achieve both full color and white light illumination.
The practical advantages of LED displays over those using incandescent bulbs are many. The operational lifetime (in this case, defined as continual illumination) of a LED is on the order of ten years or over 50,000 hours, whereas incandescent bulbs often burn out in the order of 2000 hours, thus leaving an empty pixel in the display message. Such recurrent failures make a display unreadable and, therefore, not useful. These conditions (i.e., broken or missing pixels) require constant repair leading to a significant maintenance problem for providers of display signs based on incandescent illumination devices. With the long operational lifetime of a LED-based sign board, the pixels rarely burn out and the illuminated message remains legible over long operational periods.
Similarly, LED lamps are considerably more robust. When exposed to stress, mechanical shocks, or temperature variations often encountered in an outdoor environment they are less likely to fail than incandescent lamps. This attribute is especially important when the signage is utilized in an environment such as vehicular traffic, e.g., roadway signage to mark highway construction sites, bridges, tunnels, or traffic control markings, in which perishable filaments used in the incandescent lamps frequently break due to constant vibration motion, Further, incandescent and fluorescent lamps are constructed with fragile glass exterior casings whose breakage makes the lamp useless, and by extension, the message on the sign board illegible. Due to severe environmental conditions on roadways, glass breakage of incandescent and fluorescent lamps is an all too frequent mishap. The solid state LED lamp has no filaments to break and is housed within a durable plastic casing, as the primary device envelope or package (typically being of considerable thickness), thereby exhibiting a high level of imperviousness to extreme outdoor environmental stresses. With respect to outdoor signage applications, displays can contain up to 1 million or more pixels or lamps. Thus the maintenance costs related to replacement of non-operational incandescent lamps or miniature fluorescent (or neon) lamps are high and unfortunately, continual.
Hence, an emerging trend in the manufacturing and marketing of informational displays or signage, especially for outdoor usage, is to utilize solid state LED lamps as a replacement for more conventional incandescent bulbs. The major end user benefits are the lower power consumption costs and the longer operational lifetime (hence, reducing maintenance costs). A further benefit is the rapid relaxation times of a solid state device affording an opportunity to display rapidly changing information messages incorporating video or lifelike animation.
Given the desirability of white light displays (e.g., commercial bank “time and temperature” message boards, stadium scoreboards), considerable effort has been expended to produce white light LEDs. Although the recent availability of the blue LED makes a full color, and by extension a white light display realizable, conventionally it has been considered that such a display would require multiple LEDs. The multiple LEDs would be then incorporated into complicated and expensive LED modules to obtain the required broad band illumination necessary to provide white light. Even if a discrete LED lamp were constructed that provides white illumination (as opposed to the utilization of a multitude of single die, single color discrete LED lamps in a module or sub-assembly), the current state of the art requires the utilization of multiple dies and typically at least four electrical leads to power these dies. U.S. Pat. No. 4,992,704 issued to Stinson teaches a variable color light emitting diode having a unitary housing of clear molded solid epoxy supporting three dies characterized as producing color hues of red, green and blue, respectively. There have been some recent introductions of commercial “full-color” LED lamps, that are essentially discrete lamps which afford a means of producing white light. All currently available examples of such lamps contain a minimum of three dies (or chips)—one red, one green and one blue, encapsulated in a single epoxy package. The chips are powered via at least 4 electrical leads. These complicated multiple die, variable color devices provide an expensive and complicated method of offering white light illumination. Furthermore, these multiple die white lamps are rather inefficient in the present state of the art, offering luminosity far below that realized by existing monochromatic light emitting diode lamps, even when a very large quantity of dies are functionally incorporated into the discrete lamp assembly.
The utility of solid state lamps that offer white light illumination is clear. However, at present there is a very limited number of such solid state lamps available. In signage applications where a small pixel of light is frequently required to offer the highest possible resolution of the message or video image, the most practical solid state lamps for display applications are the LED lamps. The LED lamp can have very narrow angles of irradiance and are very small in size when compared wish other means of providing a radiant surface. However, the methods of fabricating white LED lamps are limited. A conventional approach is to fabricate a large cluster of red, green and blue LED discrete lamps, housed in multiple lamp (up to 30) subassemblies or modules. By providing multiple power sources to control all of the discrete lamps, these large modules can appear, from a distance, to provide white light by the spatial mixing of blue, green and red sub-pixels of light given off by the individual discrete LED lamps that comprise the module. While the lamps that make up the modules may be individually addressable, and hence, offer the opportunity to, selectively and individually, provide red, green and blue light (or combinations thereof), such modular systems are complex and costly means of providing white light for a solid state display. Further, as these modules are rather large, the ultimate resolution of the display will always be lower than that of a conventional single lamp pixel display.
Whereas multiple discrete dies housed within a single polymeric matrix (as taught by Stinson) may provide a discrete LED lamp such that the illumination could appear white to an observer, the individual dies would still need to be individually powered and the lamp would require multiple leads in order to effect the simultaneous emission of multiple wavelength light. Thus, this multiple die LED lamp would be rather expensive to fabricate, and would require expensive and complicated circuitry to power and control in an outdoor display. Despite these problems, both methods point to the utility of generating white illuminance.
It is well known that so-called fluorescent lamps provide white light illumination. In a fluorescent lamp, the Hg vapor in the vacuum tube is excited by an electrical discharge. The excited Hg atoms emit light, primarily in the ultraviolet region (e.g., 254 nm, 313 nm, 354 nm), which is absorbed by the inorganic phosphors coating the inside walls of the tube. The phosphors then emit light. These inorganic phosphors are designed as such to offer white light emission by “down-converting” (i.e., transforming a higher frequency, shorter wavelength form of energy to a lower frequency, longer wavelength form of energy) the ultraviolet emissions of the excited states of atomic Hg into a broad spectrum of emitted light which appears as white to the observer. However, these light emitting devices are not solid-state, and miniaturization of these fluorescent bulbs to provide suitable pixel resolution for display applications has never been practically accomplished. In fact, the primary application of miniature fluorescent lamps (with long operational lifetimes, but unfortunately high power consumption when compared with solid state LED lamps) in displays is to provide back lighting to liquid crystals that are individually addressed at the pixel level. Furthermore, these miniature fluorescent lamps remain fragile light emitting devices by virtue of their glass housings and are unsuitable for use in display applications in which the lamps are exposed to extreme environmental stresses. Such stresses can not only break the glass housing, but effect delamination of the powder coatings from the interior wall of the glass housing. It would be desirable to generate white light by radiative energy transfer, where the luminescent centers are an integral part of the assembly such that a thick, difficult-to-fracture housing structure (plate or bulb) could provide white illumination from the interior thickness of such housing structure, and not from a semi-permanent powder coating placed on one side of a housing surface.
In a further example of generating white light, in the absence of phosphor coatings, it was disclosed in Chao, et al., “White Light Emitting Glasses,” Journal of Solid State Chemistry 93, 17–29 (1991) (see also El Jouhari, N., et al., “White light generation using fluorescent glasses activated by Ce3+, Tb3+ and Mn2+ ions, ” Journal de Physique IV, Colloque C2, supplement au Jouirnal de Physique III, Volume 2, October 1992, C2-257 to C2-260), that vitreous materials are capable of generating white light by simultaneous emission of blue, green and red emitting fluorescent centers in B2O3-based glass that simultaneously contain Ce3+, Tb3+, and Ma2+ as activators. These glasses provide white illumination by offering the blue emission of Ce3+ as well as by the transfer of excited state energy from the Ce3+, to Te3+ and Mn2+, whose luminescence occurs respectively in the green and red parts of the visible light spectrum.
Mixed rare earth borates can be used to provide white light illumination, Aria down conversion, with excitation of the borate powders with a primary (ultraviolet) radiation between 250 nm and 300 nm. Similarly, for cathode ray applications, white light-emitting mixed fluorescent materials can be made by careful formulation of green fluorescent materials (48 to 53% w/w), red fluorescent materials (37 to 40% w/w) and blue fluorescent materials (10 to 13% w/w).
While the devices in the above examples vary in concept and construction, they demonstrate the utilization of red, green and blue fluorescent materials, all inorganic in composition, which when excited by photons or electron beams, can release multiple wavelengths of secondary light emission (luminescence of either fluorescent or phosphorescent character) to exhibit white light to the observer. This is generally true, even if microscopic domains of discrete colored light emission can be observed on the Lambertian surface of the light-emitting device.
Tanaka, S., et al., “Bright white-light electroluminescence based on nonradiative energy transfer in Ce− and Eu-doped SrS films,” App. Phys. Lett. 51 (21), Nov. 23, 1987, 1662–1663, describes the generation of a white-light emitting thin-film electroluminescent (EL) device using Ce− and Eu-doped strontium sulfide (SrS) inorganic phosphors. In the EL excitation of the SrS:Ce,Eu device, nonradiative energy transfer from the Ce3+ luminescent center. to the Eu2+ luminescent center plays an important role in generating broad EL emission extending from the blue to the red, thereby generating white light.
Similarly, some recent discussions of AlGaN electroluminescent systems with Zn and Si dopants have indicated that some white light can be generated. While it is useful for a single device to be constructed in which dopants offer a multitude of luminescent wavelengths, dopants invariably alter the electrical and lattice structures of semiconductors and as such, the performance of these devices are considerably poorer than for corresponding semiconductors free of dopant that emit monochromatic irradiation, as a result of being dopant-free.
Until recently, most light emitting diodes have been semiconductor-based and most electroluminescent devices have been inorganic based. While organic materials have been utilized to prepare certain thin-film electroluminescent devices, no organic based LEDs are commercially available. Further, organic-based LEDs are at present plagued by extremely short operational lifetimes due to degradation of the organic charge-transfer materials. In all of these systems, the organic materials, used in thin films on conducting inorganic substrates such as ITO, are actively participating in the electron-hole recombination necessary to generate an excited state, and, by subsequent radiative decay, light.
Recently, the literature has discussed approaches directed to fabricating organic LED or electroluminescent devices and in certain cases, white light emission has been observed from these experimental designs. As an example, white light from an electroluminescent diode made from poly[3(4-octylphenyl)-2,2′-bithiophene] and an oxadiazole derivative have been reported. Spectroscopic analysis indicates that the apparent white light is composed of blue (410 nm), green (530 nm),and red-orange (520 nm) luminescent centers. Electroluminescent devices incorporating the red fluorescing material Rhodamine onto an inorganic substrate have been effective in yielding some white light as well.
White light emission from thin film organic electroluminescent cells based on poly(vinylcarbazole PVK) thin films on ITO-coated glass has also been recently reported. The cell has the construction of Mg:Ag:Alq:TAZ:doped PVK:ITO:Glass where the conducting ITO layer injects holes into the organic based PVK thin film layer which has high hole drift mobilities. Simultaneously, electrons are injected by the tris(8-quinolato) aluminum (III) complex layer Alq, into the hole blocking electron transporting layer composed of the organic molecule 3-(4′tert-butylphenyl)-4-phenyl-5-(4′-biphenyl)-1,2,4-triazole, TAZ. At the interface of the organic poly(vinlycarbazole) layer with the TAZ layer, recombination of holes and electrons take place which excites the organic, aromatic, carbazole pendant moiety that comprises the polymer. It is well known that the excited carbazole moiety within the polymer aggregates in the excited state leads to blue excimer emission, in the absence of quenchers or dopants. In the example of the organic Mg:Ag:Alq:TAZ:doped PVK:ITO:Glass electroluminescent device, the quenchers of excimeric emission, axe the dopants blue emitting 1,1,4,4-tetraphenylbuta-1,3-diene (TPB), green emitting 7-diethylamino-3-(2′benzothiazoyl)coumarin (Coumarin-6), and red emitting dicyanomethylene-2-methyl-6-p-dimethylaminostyryl-4H-pyran (DCM-1).
U.S. Pat. No. 5,045,709 issued Apr. 11, 1995 to J. E. Littman et al. discloses a white light emitting internal junction organic electroluminescent device comprising an anode, an organic electrolutninescent medium and a cathode. The organic electroluminescent medium further comprises a hole injecting and transporting zone: contiguous with the anode, and an electron injecting aid transporting zone contiguous with the cathode. The electron injecting and transporting zone further comprises an electron injecting layer in contact with the cathode. The portion of the organic electroluminescent medium between the the electron injecting layer and the hole injecting and transporting zone emits white light in response to the hole-electron recombination, and comprises a fluorescent material and a mixed ligand aluminum chelate.
Japanese Patent Publication 04289691 of Mitsubishi Cable Industries, Ltd., published Oct. 14, 1992, discloses an electroluminescent device comprising a fluorescent dye-fixed silica layer coated with a transparent electrode layer, a luminescing (light-emitting) layer containing a phosphor, a backside electrode layer, a water-sorbing layer, an encapsulating film, and an insulating layer.
In the Mitsubishi patent publication, the silica layer may be formed by a sol gel process using metal alkoxides in a solvent such as ethanol, isopropanol, or dimethyl ether. A Rhodamine 6G-doped silica layer is described to exhibit white luminescence. The luminescing layer may be for example on the order of 15 microns in thickness, and is formed by a sol gel technique yielding ZnS or ZnCdS doped with a dopant such as copper, aluminum, manganese, chlorine, boron, yttrium, or rare earth dopant. The luminescing layer may also contain scattered phosphor material. The average grain size of grains in the luminescing layer is generally greater than 10 microns, and preferably is in the range of from 15 to 40 microns. The luminescing layer may for example contain from 30 to 80% phosphor. A disclosed advantage of the foregoing structure is that one can change the phosphor in the luminescing layer, and thereby change the color of the whole material.
Japanese Patent Publication 60170194 of Sony Corporation, published Sep. 3, 1985, discloses a white light-emitting electroluminescent device with a luminescent layer containing a mixture of a blue-green-emitting phosphor and Rhodamine S. Since Rhodamine S strongly fluoresces orange by excitation with a bluish-green light, a white light of high luminosity may be obtained even at low voltage. This reference discloses a phosphor emitting blue-green light, in which ZnS is doped with Cu and Cl, as well as a phosphor emitting yellow light, in which ZnS is doped with Cu and Mn. ZnS may also be doped with Cu and Br to produce green light.
The Sony portent publication discloses a multilayer electroluminescent article, including sealing layers of protective film of a material such as Aclar polymer, a polyester layer, a transparent electrode formed of indium tin oxide (ITO), a light-emitting layer, and a backside electrode. The light-emitting layer may comprise 50–95% by weight of ZnS doped with the aforementioned dopant species (e.g., 0.045% wt. Cu, and 0.020% wt. Cl) and 5–50% wt. Rhodamine S.
Not withstanding the progress made in using organic fluorescers as luminescent sites within either electron-transport or hole-transport layers and affording thin-film interfacial hole-electron recombination, the current state of the art finds it difficult to generate organic based dies with reasonable operational lifetimes. By their very nature, these donor-acceptor complexes are prone to reaction with the surrounding medium. As a result, many of these organic molecules degrade under constant excitation to the excited state and consequently the organic-based LEDs fail. Those fluorescers with extremely high quantum, yields of fluorescence, which by definition necessitate short excited state lifetimes and are unlikely to be quenched or degraded by oxygen or other reactants, do not have sufficient electron or hole transport properties to allow for device-wide localized hole-electron recombination in the ground state. However, their proximity to the holes, as dopants in a hole transporting layer, as an example, may make the excited states of the luminophors more easily oxidized than would normally be the case. This would be especially true for excited state species, even if the ground state of the luminophors are stable to the holes in the hole-transporting layer. Similarly arguments regarding excited state reduction would be applicable for dopants sequestered within an electron-transport layer.
It would thus be highly desirable to develop a simple solid state LED lamp, with a minimum of power leads, (i.e., 2) exactly as practiced in single color LED lamps, such that three domains of red, green and blue light ate generated and yet the white light emission is apparent to an observer, all while offering significantly reduced die costs (one versus three) and low fabrication costs in the design of corresponding displays and signage, high medium resolution (small pixel or lamp size), rapid switching to the on and off states (to enhance live video imaging), and with a high luminous efficiency.